This week should be interesting and helpful for some of you…I hope. I get emails from readers asking me what steps do I take to create the comics. So I thought I would take this week to show the steps. For the next five days, I will update the same comic from start to finish.

Step 1: Sketch
Step 2: Inking
Step 3: Flats

After I inked the comic and exported the lineart from Flash, I imported the lineart into a photoshop template I created for all the comics. The template contains two folders and couple of empty layers. One folder contains the copyright line and issue number of the comic. All I have to do is change the number when I create a new comic. The other folder will contain any dialog and speech bubbles.

I set the lineart layer to “Multiply” so anything under it will show through.

Now before I start coloring the comic, I created a layer called “Flats”. What are “flats”? Flats are chunks of color that make up the whole image. They separate key objects from another object by using different solid colors. If you still don’t understand, they help you stay inside the line by selecting the areas you want to color.

How to create “flats”…

It’s pretty easy actually. However, depending how detailed the art is, it will take a lot of patience and time to create a decent flats layer.

So yeah, to create the flats, all you need is the polygon lasso tool. Also make sure the anti-alias is turned off. Otherwise you will get a white line between each color.

Basically you select an area and fill. Then work your way in with different color. For example, in the last panel, I traced Hawk with the polygon tool and filled in with a dark gray. Then I traced out his face and filled it with a lighter color. Then his eyes, his coat, his pants, etc.

That’s it for flats. If you have any questions about the steps, feel free to ask them here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 5:00 am and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.